“Email marketing doesn’t work!” People who say this have it wrong. They’re confusing the medium with the message.

You may get dozens if not hundreds of emails each day that are tossed into your bulk mail or spam folder before you even see them. Of those that you do open, sometimes by mistake, most want to sell you stuff that you don’t want or need.

It’s true that a lot of email is pure junk, but before you dismiss email entirely as an effective marketing tool, you should know that for the past year I’ve been using a planned sequence of two emails that result in $15 to 20,000 in sales each time they’re sent out. And you can have the same success.

Here are four ways you can use email to increase your profits by helping more people buy your products and services.

1. Send Email to People That Ask For It
Sending email to people who have never heard of you is almost always a waste of time. They’re not going to open your email, much less read it.

Before people will open and read your emails, you have to prove to them that you can be trusted to provide helpful ideas or information. Then you can politely ask them to give you their contact information and ask their permission to email them. In your first email, double check that they want to hear from you.

The confirmation process described above may seem onerous, but it keeps all of us from being deluged with spam and ensures that the people on your email list want to hear from you and are interested in buying from you.

What’s the fastest way to build your own massive email list? Use this link to get the details about this marketing idea >>

2. Get the Conversation Going
One of the biggest mistakes online marketers make is sending out a barrage of emails that try to sell right away. Send emails like these out and you’ll destroy the trust you’ve been working hard to develop.

Instead, use your marketing emails to demonstrate that you’re the go-to expert in your industry niche. And periodically ask your readers’ relevant questions. Hearing their feedback will let you know what they want and need.

People are much more likely to buy from you when they know you, trust you and feel like they can talk to you.

Ready to find out the secrets to using email to build trust and sales? Start here >>

3. Use Personal Reputation To Increase Sales
Your personal reputation is the sum of every thing your prospect has seen or heard about you and your company. Ideally, your prospects think of you as helpful and interested in them as well as, knowledgeable, up-to-date, trustworthy and reliable.

If your reputation isn’t solid, people will perceive too much risk when you ask them to buy. If you’ve got a strong reputation, your prospects are much more likely to respond when you suggest a product or service and become clients and customers.

How can you use email to build your brand and your profits? Find out here >>

What can you do if you’re just getting started or have been in business for years but aren’t reaching many buyers with your current email list?

Find another company targeting the same market you’re trying to reach. Let them review your products and then make them an offer that can’t be beat to promote your products or services.

When one of the most famous people in your industry niche tells people to buy your product, you’ll generate five times as many sales as you would trying to make the sale yourself.

4. Listen to Your Readers; They’re Your Buyers
Your marketing emails are going to thousands, if not tens of thousands, prospects. You can’t hear what those prospects say when they get your email, but there is an easy way to find out what they are thinking.

Each time you send an email, check your email tracking stats to see:

# The percentage of people that opened your email,

# Of those people that opened your email, how many followed the links provided in the email,

# How many of those that followed the link made a purchase.

Use this information to improve the results of your next email. For example when I log into my email broadcast service I can see how many people opened each of the html emails I send.

When you have this information you can determine which topics and subject lines to focus on and which to dump. Similarly you can use tracking links in your newsletter to see what percentage of people who read your emails went to your product page and how many of those made a purchase.

With a little bit of simple tracking data in hand you can identify whether to fix your subject line, your email content or your sales page, or all three.

Want to know the secrets to using email to grow your business? I’ve been testing and refining my email and web marketing strategies for almost a decade.

Here’s a shortcut to email marketing success >>

Do these 4 ideas sound too simplistic? 90% of my sales are in response to emails that either I send out or my sales partners send out on my behalf. Using the four email strategies above, you could easily boost your sales by more than you ever imagined.

Want to increase your online profits? Put these ideas to work today to see your website profits soar.

To your success,

Charlie

P.S. - Even if you already have a web site that’s making money, I challenge you to double your profits this summer. I know you can if you use these proven email marketing ideas and techn iques >>

P.P.S. - I’m always amazed at how many people keep doing the same thing over and over when it doesn’t work. I know you’re smarter than that and would rather find out how to use these proven email strategies to grow your business too >>

“I have been reading your newsletter and very impressed with the knowledge you have about marketing. Your letters grab attention as well as provide substance.

My question is about email sales letter. How important is the writing of that sales letter? I’m surprised to see the big price range for copywriters. Is it true that one writer can have 50 percent more value over others, when they basically talk about the same thing? If there is indeed that much of difference, how would one tell, the good from the bad, the super good from the ordinary ones?” - Felicia

What’s the difference between good marketing copy and copy that kills sales?

Want to know which words sell? Use this link >>

A good copywriter can use the right words to grab your prospects’ attention and give them enough substance to keep them reading. Whether it’s your web page, a sales brochure or your email, you want the marketing copy to work to capture your prospects’ interest, engage their imaginations and get them thinking about how much better off they’d be with the solution you offer.

Most marketing copy is so boring prospects won’t read it and you don’t keep their attention and you lose the sale. Good copywriters can charge more, a lot more because their copy can generate 2 to 10 as many sales.

How should you pick a marketing copywriter to help you grow your business?

Find one who can give you proof! Any good copywriter should have examples of sales letters or emails he or she has written and testimonials from clients who can back up his or her claims.

If it’s results you want, don’t hire anyone who can’t demonstrate that they can help you get the business results you’re after.

Poor copy will not only not get any results but will turn off your prospects and can kill potential future sales.

Which words sell? Use this link >>

Good copy can send your sales through the roof. I have one client who happily pays her copywriter $500 to write their weekly email because the cost is a pittance relative to all the sales it generates.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Sells

What’s the one problem that can kill your email marketing efforts? No matter how clever your emails, or how big your mailing list is you can see your sales die if this happens to you.

What’s the number one email marketing problem that few people talk about?

Over the last two months I’ve continued to email to my growing list of over 30,000 opt-in subscribers weekly and seen my sales volume decrease each week. At first I thought maybe it was a seasonal issue, people were taking advantage of the spring weather and not spending as much time shopping for advice online. But the continued decline in sales just didn’t make sense in comparison to the 5-10% monthly growth I’d seen the previous year.

What was going on? Why weren’t my email marketing efforts working as well as they had been?

When I looked further into the problem, I noticed that not only were sales down but the number of people who were opening the emails with my weekly marketing tip was down. Previously 20% of the people I mailed to opened my weekly email. Recently this had dropped to less than 10%.

Now that made sense. Fewer people opening and reading my emails equaled fewer sales. But why were fewer and fewer people opening my top marketing ideas and tips?

I had an idea. Was it that my emails weren’t getting through? My email broadcast service assured me that 92-98% of my emails were getting through, though now I seriously question their data.

Then two weeks ago, it got even worse! I noticed that I wasn’t receiving new order notices from my email broadcast and shopping cart system even though people were still buying.

It turned out that my email broadcast service had gotten their email servers listed as the sources of spam and blocked by the AOLs, GMails, AT&Ts and other services which provide email to consumers. How did this happen? I wasn’t sending email that was spam.

One bad apple does it. What had happened was that despite my efforts to be squeaky clean with my email marketing, one or two of my email broadcast services customers were flagrantly violating all the guidelines and using the service to send unwanted email. The result.

My email broadcast service had it’s servers blacklisted - which meant everyone of its thousands of customers emails were blocked. (Not the first time this had happened either.) Within a couple of days they had booted up new servers and were sending email broadcasts again but - I decided it was time to make a switch.

Why did I decide to change to a new email broadcast service?

First, the day, my email provider service got blacklisted, I received an email from a friendly competitor of mine who also runs a popular small business marketing site. Obviously he wasn’t using the same blacklisted broadcast service I was. He was using one I’d considered a while back. He was using > http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Secondly, when I wrote my friend I asked him about his experience with his email broadcast service and most importantly what his open rate was, i.e. what percent of people he mailed to opened his emails. He wrote back to say his open rate was 35%, which is good and was more than three times what mine had declined to.

Last week I began to make the switch. This week I ran a simple test.

I sent the same email to different sets of subscribers via my previous service and the one I’d decided to try out. The result. My open rate was 50+% via the new service versus 9% at the old.

Obviously it wasn’t the emails that were the problem but the service sending them.

Want to know who I signed up with? Use this link >> http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Should you change to a different email broadcast service?

Send your emails in html format so you can determine the open rate. A couple of days after you send out your next email check to see how many people opened it. If it’s less than 20+%, chances are you have a problem. The solution is to signup with an email marketing service that strictly prohibits the sending of unwanted emails and whose email servers aren’t listed as sources of spam.

Here’s the top quality service for serious online marketers who want to use email marketing to grow their business >>
http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/email.html

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to increase sales, but to make it work you need to make sure people get your emails.

- Charlie

Do a search on popular web site marketing topics and “List Building” comes up as one of the most popular. If you don’t have a large in-house qualified list to mail to then, you should.

A few tactics to use are a free giveaway to motivate people to fill in a simple form on your site and give you their contact information. The best ways to get people to your site to fill in the form is top search engine placement, articles, links from other sites and Google Ads. But just building your list is only the start to making your online marketing work…

The key to online marketing success isn’t just having a big list of qualified prospects, it’s using it correctly to convert prospects to clients. Here are a couple of key things to remember.

Unless your prospects receive and open the emails you send them you’re wasting your time. Many email broadcast services happily charge you to send your mailings, but only a few actually deliver.

That’s right. You could have list of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects but when most email broadcast services send your emails, only a very small percentage receive them much less open them. More important than a great subject line to get them to open your email, or great copy to get them to read it is how many people actually receive your email.

Want to know if your email campaigns are working?

Send your email in html and then check the open rates. If only a couple of percent of people are reading it you’ve got a problem. With a top quality email broadcast service 20-30% of your audience should at least open your emails.

What’s more important than building your list?

The number of people who actually get your email and open it.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing - Time Tested and Proven Ideas

This past week AT&T started blocking my email, email to my AT&T email service from my own web sites, and then I discovered AT&T along with a number of other phone companies has also started blocking access to free VOP conference call services.

I’m not sure what AT&T is up to but it would appear they are trying to make it harder for you to market your business wihout resorting to using their phone services.

Just when small business owners are starting to discover the effectiveness of using email to market their businesses it appears the phone companies are getting greedy and want to squeeze the internet for more profits.

What do you think?

- Charlie Cook
Small Business Marketing That Gets Resutls

“My outbound e-mails keep going to people’s junk mail folders. Any idea why?”
- Tina

Spam filters block emails for a lot of reasons. The result is, as you’ve found out, that many of your legitimate emails don’t get through but lots of spam still does. Here are three ways your email could be getting caught in spam filters.

1. Bad words, like here, now, etc.
Use to many of these and the spam filters block your email. Here’s a list of many words to avoid >>

One preventative measure to take is to check to see if any of the words in your email might trigger a spam filter and than edit accordingly, though it’s not clear that all spam filters will block your email if it uses an “offending word once or twice”.

Here’s the link to one free spam checker you can use as a guide >>

2. Use of characters or unusual spellings that the spam filters think you could be using to avoid them. For example trying to slip sales by as ’s.ales’.

3. Your mail server. Unless you’re using a service that regularly makes sure they are on the white list of approved bulk email senders, you’re email can get blocked even though it’s legitimate. Here’s the link to the email broadcast service I use >>

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing That Works